At Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Hwang was from 1994 to 1996 a research assistant and from 1996 to 2003 a member of the technical staff.
[3] As a Ph.D. student, Hwang was part of a team that discovered that spin-polarized tunnel currents in polycrystalline manganates produce very high magnetoresistances.
[4] During his time at Bell Laboratories, his team developed methods for studying the "nature and length scales of charge screening in complex oxides" and how "short-length-scale electronic response can be probed and incorporated in thin-film oxide heterostructures"[5] and also pointed out a two-dimensional metallic state at the interface between the band insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3.
[7] An article that Hwang co-authored with Jan Hendrik Schön and two other physicists was published in April 2001 in the journal Science, but was retracted in November 2002.
[10][11] On 18th June 2014 he received, together with Jochen Mannhart and Jean-Marc Triscone, the Europhysics Prize of the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society.